The Cave from Which Terrorism's Wellspring Flows

BY RUSS WELLEN11.30.2005 08:20 | DISPATCHES

Lloyd deMause, the director of the Psychohistory Institute, has no qualms about spelling out the primitive impulses that fuel American foreign policy. But in The Emotional Life of Nations (Other Press, 2002), he maintains:

"The roots of current terrorist [Islamic] attacks lie, I believe, not in this or that American foreign policy error but in the extremely abusive families of the terrorists."

We'll let deMause, one of the great overlooked thinkers of our time (inexplicably, The Emotional Life is unavailable in the New York City Public Library system), speak for himself.

". . . a recent survey of Palestinian students show that the sexual abuse of girls is far higher in Islamic societies than elsewhere. . ."

"Physicians for Human Rights found that 97 percent of Afghan women they surveyed suffered from severe depression."